


Hallowe'en

by gakorogirl



Category: Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica - James A. Owen
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-12
Updated: 2017-11-12
Packaged: 2019-01-30 14:59:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12655836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gakorogirl/pseuds/gakorogirl
Summary: Jack needs an excuse to get out of Tamerlane House. He's supposed to be running a routine training mission with Susan Cooper. Things go wrong- but then, this /is/ the Archipelago of Dreams.





	Hallowe'en

**Author's Note:**

  * For [AslansCompass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/AslansCompass/gifts).



**October 31, 1968**

“You don’t know how to use a trump card yet, do you?” asked Jack, riffling through his pockets to pull out an illuminated card. The edges were battered with handling, and slightly curled.  
“I’ve never travelled through one,” Susan said. “I saw Ransom use one on Prydain, though.” She took the card hesitantly, and squinted at the details of the drawing inked on the thick paper square. It showed a city lit up orange and gold, with rows of saplings stretching out beyond the walls and down to the sea.  
“Concentrate on the card until it turns into a portal,” Jack said, and then added, “John did this one, and I haven’t tried it out yet. It might not work the first time around.”

Susan took the square of paper, careful not to tear the yellowing edges. “Where is this?” she asked, squinting at the card. An ocean stretched out behind the city, and there was a three-masted merchant ship coming into port.

“The capital of the Archipelago,” said Jack. “New Paralon.” An old sadness crossed his face, and he glanced away. Susan had the odd and creeping sense that she had stumbled upon a stranger’s funeral, something private and awkward and heavy with grief. “The first Paralon was destroyed by the Echthroi,” Jack said after a while.

Susan tried to meet his eyes, and he folded his arms and looked up at the sky. “I think it’s going to rain soon. Any luck opening the trump?”

“Not yet,” said Susan, and took a deep breath. The fine lines of the illustration wavered, the colors deepening to autumn brightness and a deep twilight sky as the card grew in her hands. She nearly lost her focus, and for a moment the opening began to shrink again.

“Easy does it,” said Jack over her shoulder. He jumped forward and through, the picture rippling for a second as he landed on the grass on the other side and smiled back at her. “Keep hold of the card with one hand when you come through,” he called. “John would be terribly upset if I lost this one.”

For a moment, Susan waited, enjoying the feeling of the buzzing card in her hands. Near the middle of the trump, the picture of the city was as detailed and bright as a photograph, and at the edges it faded into watercolors, purple and green and silver-blue sea. Jack raised his eyebrows, and Susan stepped through.

She blinked, and the trump was small in her hand again. The air smelled like fresh-cut grass and sea salt. They had landed in the middle of a pumpkin patch, and Jack sat down on the largest pumpkin and looked out to sea. “Paralon was famous for its apple orchards,” he said. “Miles and miles of the best apple trees in all of the Archipelago. They say in the springtime the whole island was pink and white with flowers, as far as you could see.”

“These are apple trees,” said Susan, walking to the edge of the orchard. The saplings were not quite as tall as she was, and their leaves had begun to turn to gold in the cool air from the sea. “But they can’t be more than two or three years old.”

“When we set up this island as the capital, some of the animals insisted that Madoc plant apple orchards, to keep up the old traditions,” said Jack. “It turns out the dirt here isn’t too different from what was on the original Paralon, and the trees have been doing well so far. But it’s going to be three or four years yet before the first real crop of apples.”

“So what are we doing here?” asked Susan.

“I’m pretending to run an important Caretaker mission so I can get out of Tamerlane House for a few hours,” said Jack cheerfully. “And I thought you might be interested in Halloween in the Archipelago.”

“So we’re not going on an adventure,” said Susan, disappointed. Jack stood up and gave her a keen look that she couldn’t quite understand- almost angry and almost sad.

“If you want adventure enough, you’ll find one,” he said in an odd voice. “But I won’t promise that you’re going to like whatever you find.”

“It’s just that I thought it would all feel, oh, more _mythological,”_ Susan tried to explain. “Prydain was really all politics, except for that sticky bit with the goblins, and Tamerlane House is amazing, but it isn’t quite the sort of adventure that Maddie and Ray talk about.”

Jack gave her that sharp sad look again and said, “There’s always something happening in the Archipelago. You’ll have your adventures soon.” He took a deep breath and added, “We should get out of this pumpkin patch before some poor hedgehog mistakes us for robbers.”

The city was lit up with candles, and a lamplighter was moving down the cobblestone streets and tapping a thin metal rod to each of the globular streetlamps along the side of the road. As the rod touched the glass, the lamps began to glow a soft yellow and white. A small child in a pumpkin mask ran into Susan’s legs and toppled backwards onto the street, his mask tilted sideways on his face. His friends hung back, and Susan heard a girl with shockingly purple hair and thick glasses saying, “That’s Caretaker Jack.”

Susan reached down and helped the boy up, noticing as she did so that he had delicate cloven hooves instead of feet. “Having fun?” she asked, and he nodded and ran back to the other children.

“What are you laughing at?” Susan asked Jack, bemused.

“That girl is dressed as Charles,” he said in a strangled voice, trying to force down his laughter as they kept walking. “Her hair isn’t as bad as his was when he first dyed it, though,” he added after a speculative glance back over his shoulder.

“It smells the way you’d think Halloween should,” Susan remarked. The air was heavy with cinnamon and the faint sulphur smell of matchsticks, and she caught a whiff of apple and caramel as a street vendor pushed by a cart of candied apples. “This is...nice. Thank you for bringing me.”

“I might’ve told John I was taking you for training,” said Jack a little sheepishly. “He gets worried when I leave Tamerlane House, but I’m likely to go mad if I stay in. I’ve read everything in the library, and it’s going to be a few months yet before Sam Clemens finishes that new book.”

“You’ve read _everything_ in the library?”

Susan had seen the Tamerlane House library on her previous trip to the Archipelago, and she could barely imagine taking the time to read through all the shelves of leatherbound books. Jack shrugged. “I was waiting,” he said. “After I, ah, died, I spent years waiting for Rose and Charles to return from Deep Time, and I started reading through everything new. In alphabetical order. Three years is quite a lot of time when all you have to do is read and wait and hope.”

“How long were they lost in Deep Time?”

“Nearly twenty years. John and I tried to keep busy and write and- well, try not to think about it Because as the years went by, thinking about it would bring me dangerously close to despairing that I would ever see them again. Rose and Charles and Laura Glue and Edmund. And Madoc had gone with them, too.”

“I think that cat is following us,” said Susan suddenly. When Jack turned to look at the large tortiseshell tabby walking a little ways behind them, it looked fixedly at a streetlap and sat down.

“Good evening,” Jack called to the cat, raising one hand. Its eyes flicked to him briefly, glowing a vivid foxfire green, like moonlight through oakleaves, like the shining green light that fills deep forests.

“Do you think it’s a talking Cat?” asked Susan.

“I don’t know,” said Jack doubtfully. “I admit I thought _all_ the animals on Paralon could speak, but it might be a ship’s cat from one of the merchant ships. I don’t think it’s following us, though,” he said. “Say, we should stop by the badgers’ shop while we’re here, and say hello to Fred.”

He made a sharp turn between a pub and a store selling chunks of amethyst and ruby the size of Susan’s fist and headed down a side street that opened into a large courtyard. There was a store taking up a good side of the courtyard with windows piled high with books, and as Susan came closer she saw that nearly all the books were different editions of the Little Whatsit- a pocket-sized version, and a version that she suspected was larger than the Geographica itself. Jack pushed open the door, and crystal chimes rang somewhere in the depths of the stacks of books. Susan picked up a beautiful leatherbound copy of the Little Whatsit and began flipping through it.

“Fred?” called Jack. After a moment, a badger’s head popped up over a bookshelf.

“Scowler Jack!” the young badger beamed, climbing down from the ladder he had been perching on. “You scarcely made it in time, we’re just about t’close up.”

“I’d never miss a chance to come by,” said Jack warmly. “Especially since Charles told me you’re expanding into baked goods. Anyway, this is Susan Cooper, she’s been an Apprentice Caretaker for about two years now. Susan, this is Fred, you didn’t have a chance to meet him last time you were in the Archipelago.”

Fred extended a paw, and Susan shook it gravely. “It’s nice to meet you,” she said. As she straightened up, she saw the tortiseshell cat looking in through the shop window. Its eyes gleamed as it met her gaze.

“Fred is our only Caretaker who lives in the Archipelago,” Jack was saying cheerfully. “His apprentice Sorrel is also from the Archipelago- Doorn, wasn’t it?” he asked Fred.

“Felimath,” said Fred, offering them a plate of chocolate-chip cookies.

“Blast,” Jack muttered, taking a cookie. “One day I’ll get them straight.”

“You’ve been sayin’ that for the past thirty years,” Fred said. “I think you’ve gotten them mixed up for good. Camillo,” he said to another badger who was rearranging one of the window displays, “D’you mind closing up?”

Susan took another look at the cat and stepped out the door and into the street. Behind her, she heard the chimes jingle, and she winced. “Where are you going?” Jack called.

“Better hurry,” said the cat. “Follow me.” And it turned and bounded down the street, and Susan ran after it, weaving around merchant carts and leaping over a display of lit jack-o-lanterns. She followed the cat through three sharp turns and ran through a flock of crows, which scattered black-winged into the night.

The clock struck ten.

“Wait,” Susan called, a little breathless. The cat stopped between a theater and a store that appeared to be selling used books and windchimes. Between the shops was a wrought-iron gate, and the cat leapt easily over the fence and stared at Susan from the other side. She hesitated, and then cried out in alarm as the cat turned into a ragged young boy with green eyes shining from beneath his brown curls.

“Come make stories, Caveo,” said the cat-boy, smiling with sharp teeth. He was clad in fur, dark brown and black tortiseshell like the cat’s fur, and for a moment Susan was no longer sure whether she was looking at an animal or a child. She pushed open the gate, and the cat was a cat again, trotting down a narrow street lit by pumpkin-orange candles. It did not look back to see whether she was following.

“Where are you _going?”_ Jack demanded, catching up with her. He was holding Fred under one arm, and his coat had come unbuttoned.

“I’m following the cat-boy,” said Susan, already halfway down the path. She looked to her left and jumped a little to see a skull looking back at her from the display window of a cramped little dressshop. After a moment, she realized that she was looking at a skeleton in an evening dress, made to look like a mannequin.

“Werecats,” growled Fred as Jack set him down and followed after Susan. “They’re nothin’ but trouble.” He sniffed the air suspiciously. “I’ve never been in this part of the city before.”

“We can go exploring,” said Susan. Jack frowned and pried up a loose cobblestone, using the rock to prop open the iron gate.

“Call me paranoid,” he said to Fred in a low voice, “But I don’t like to close doors behind me.” The badger winced and nodded vigorously before trotting along after Susan.

The skeleton in the evening dress stepped closer to the window and leaned sideways to get a better look at the Caretakers as they passed her by.

All the shops along the narrow roads had orange candles in the windows, and jack-o-lanterns with smiling faces. The air smelled of apple cider and wood smoke, and Susan tilted her hair back to taste it. A few bats wheeled over the round yellow moon.

“I’m thinking something’s strange here,” said Fred, tugging on Jack’s coat. A very tall figure in a black suit walked past them, and Jack felt an urge _not_ to look up at the figure’s face. On the street, a pair of children ran past, throwing candy back and forth between them. A bluebird flew around Jack’s head and alighted on the shoulder of the taller child.

“Surely you haven’t explored all of New Paralon,” said Jack. A shiver ran down his spine as a trio of cloaked figures slid past, and he pressed his lips together as the jack-o-lanterns flared a little brighter and more richly yellow. The colors of the night seemed richened here, brighter and darker and sharper at the edges. “No, you’re right. It is sort of...uncanny here. There’s enchantment in the air.”

“What’s bothering me is that the moon’s full,” said Fred, pointing a paw at the harvest moon. “I could’ve sworn it was a half-moon back in the city, and just startin’ to rise.”

“Cat!” called Susan, looking around for either the cat or the long-haired wildling boy. The cat had slipped into a crowd of women in black dresses and white aprons, and she had not seen him since. She sighed and turned to a store selling pies, the white-clothed window displays sagging under the weight of heavy apple and pumpkin pies. “Don’t these look good?” she asked Jack.

“I wouldn’t eat them if I were you,” warned Jack, crossing over to stand beside her. “You’d be much safer eating the pies from Fred’s shop, and more likely to find your way back home afterward.”

“You think it’s fairy food?” asked Susan immediately, stepping away from the window.

“Do you remember what the moon looked like when we passed through the gate?” asked Jack, angling his head toward the full yellow moon. Susan took a deep, nervous breath.

“Come on,” said a voice at her elbow, sounding like wind through willow trees. The cat-boy was standing there, with his overlong hair and green green eyes. Jack stepped forward, and the cat let go of Susan’s sleeve but did not flinch away.

“Why should she follow you?” he asked sharply. “Do you need our help?”

“Werecats don’t ask for help,” said Fred. The cat smiled at him with pointed teeth and he bristled, his fur fluffing up around the edges of his waistcoat.

“A stray cat will take you places you’d never find alone, Caveo,” said the cat. “With all your watching and your wit you could never stumble into Halloween Town on your lonesome. Add it to your maps. Name it. Make it _real._ ”

“Seems real enough already,” said Fred, looking around. “But Dad says most Soft Places seem that way once you get inside them.”

“You want us to add Halloween Town to the map of New Paralon?” asked Susan, dropping into a squat to look fully into the cat’s face. He looked a little older than her son, perhaps five years old, but he had very fine whiskers on either side of his nose and he looked at her unblinking.

“Make it real,” he said. “It makes my fur stand on edge to live in a place that isn’t true.”

And then he was a cat again, and he ran lightfooted through the crowd and ducked into a shop with a creaking sign and windows filled with dried herbs. Susan glanced inside, but the inside was hazy with sage smoke and she couldn’t see the cat anywhere in the store.

“Well,” said Jack. “If you’re to make a map of this place, I suppose we should start in this main square and move outward.” He pulled a small notebook and a stub of pencil from his coat, adding, “We can send Edmund the notes later and he’ll make us a proper map to add to the _Geographica._ ”

Halloween Town, it transpired, was no more than a few blocks across. The town was bounded by a blackened iron fence that matched the gate through which they had come in, but there were no other gates apparent. Beyond the fence was a graveyard full of crumbling grey headstones, and beyond that a forest.

Jack stood on the tips of his toes to get a better view of the trees over the fence. “I’m no expert,” he said to Susan, “but I don’t recognize these trees as anything native to England, or any part of the Archipelago I’ve seen.”

“I think I could fit through the bars,” said Fred, giving the fence a speculative look.

“Better not risk it,” Jack told him. “The town’s unsettling enough- I don’t want to know what’s outside the walls. Besides, that graveyard looks old, and it’s likely to have ghouls.”

“Good point,” Fred said, and stepped quickly away from the bars.

“I think we’ve got about everything,” said Jack. “I saw a pub a few streets back,” he added. “Near the chapel with the gargoyles. We deserve a break.” A cat meowed somewhere behind him, and he looked around with a frown.

“Well, let’s go,” said Susan, checking the notes. “That chapel was at the corner of Knockturn and...that street where the streetsign had rotted away.”

It takes only a few minutes for them to get back. “I thought you said Knockturn,” Jack says. “This is- Wolfsbane. Knockturn is the next one over.”

“Oh,” Fred mutters, checking his notes. “Guess I wrote it down wrong, then.” He began to industriously work away at the paper with the eraser, and rewrote the street names as they stepped into the pub.

Compared to the rest of Halloween Town, the pub was teeming with people. Many of the patrons were wearing greatcoats and sequined masks, and a very tall, pale man stood behind the counter mixing drinks. A great fire took up nearly one wall, and the floor was spread thick with rushes. Susan nearly made herself dizzy turning to take it all in.

“Here,” said Jack, steering them to a table.

In the corner, a dark-haired young man was playing a lute and singing in a language Susan could not understand. A thin black cat prowled across the bar with a gleaming white bone held in its mouth.

“Evening,” said a man’s voice behind them. Susan jumped, coming face to face with two men in outdated formal suits. The speaker had deep red hair and ruby cufflinks, and in the light of the lamps his eyes had seemed for a moment the color of flame. In one hand, he was loosely holding a bottle of champagne. His companion was almost more striking, very tall and with hair so blonde it could nearly be mistaken for white. “Mind if we join you?”

“Not at all,” said Jack, but as they sat down he frowned and his eyes flicked to the redheaded man’s left hand. His shirtsleeve had been pushed up a little, and a band of white silk marked with glowing golden runes was just visible around his wrist. Susan squinted, trying to make out any language she recognized in the glowing letters, and the man pulled his sleeve down and refastened his cufflink.

“It’s a Binding,” he said, and smiled. “A bit of the ribbon the gods used to tie the Fenris-wolf back at the beginning of things. I hate _Bindings,_ ” he added with a sudden savagery, pulling at the ribbon. It was knotted tightly, too close to his skin for him to fit his fingers beneath it.

“Lovely night, isn’t it?” the blond man said with a kind of grim determination. “I saw you walking about town earlier. The food is perfectly safe.” As he spoke, he lazily spun his gold-headed cane in one hand.

“Is your cane shaped like a dragon?” asked Susan, curiously, and the man’s face brightened.

“A gryphon, actually,” he said, turning the cane so the golden handle was visible. “I bought it at the goblin market,” he added in a lower voice. “It has a sword hidden inside.”

“If I had a hidden weapon,” said Fred, “I wouldn’t go around telling everyone about it.”

The blond man tilted his head, slowly. “If one can’t trust the Caretakers, we face darker times than any the Archipelago has yet experienced.”

Fred blinked, and the man smiled.

“My apologies,” he said. “I don’t mean to make anything public.” His companion scowled and took a drink of champagne directly from the bottle, and out of the corner of Susan’s eye she thought his eyes had flashed red for another moment.

“I don’t think we caught your names,” said Jack. “And you seem to know us.”

“You make yourselves obvious,” said the red-haired man, setting the bottle on the table. His hat was noticeably floating several inches above his head, and the blonde man looked alarmed and rose to his feet.

“It’s time for us to go,” he said tightly. “My _friend_ looks like he’s had too much to drink.” He tapped his cane on the ground, and the red-haired man shot him a murderous glance before striding out of the pub.

“What on earth was that?” asked Susan. She looked out the window and saw the two walking down the street, and as she watched the redhead flipped over to float on his back, legs crossed. He was having some kind of argument with the blond man between sips of champagne.

“The tall one seemed all right,” said Fred, but the fur between his ears was standing on end. “T’other one smelled like- curdled milk, and blackpowder. Do you think it _was_ the same Binding they put on the Fenris-wolf?”

“Gleipnir? I doubt it,” said Jack, absentmindedly. “But I know I recognize him from some book. Both of them.” He drummed his fingers on the table. “Cane with a sword in it- I wonder who else could have met these two?”

“Is that Ransom over there?” asked Susan suddenly. A very tall man was sitting at one of the tables with his knees folded up to his chest, chatting amiably to what looked like a heat mirage shimmering in the seat across from him.

“It _is,”_ said Jack, baffled. “I wonder how he ended up in Halloween Town.” He stood up and walked over, and after a moment Fred and Susan followed him. (Susan gave a sideways glance to the bartender, who momentarily looked to have lifted his head off his shoulders.) “Ransom, what are you doing out of Ta-”

Ransom jumped, and the heat-shimmer in the other seat vanished. “Look what you’ve done,” he said with an edge to his voice, and pushed his glasses up his nose. He blinked, giving Jack an odd look. “Lewis, how did _you_ get here?”

“Here,” said Fred, lifting his silver Caretaker’s watch in one paw. “What year is it?”

“I was aiming for 1812,” said Ransom sheepishly, as he briefly held up his own watch, “But I realized pretty quickly I’d made a mistake. Serves me right for trying to jump through space and time at once, and on Halloween, too.”

“What year is it in your timeline?” asked Susan curiously.

“Oh, I couldn’t tell you,” Ransom answered with a shrug. “The length of a year changes from planet to planet, six hundred and eighty-five or eighty-eight days, and I never remember to ask the year when I get home. Anyway, Lewis, could you tell me what part of the Archipelago this is?”

“It’s, uh. Halloween Town?” said Jack, uncertainly. “I would tell you more if I knew, but I don’t think we’re in the Archipelago proper right now.”

Someone tugged on Susan’s sleeve, and she looked down to see the cat-boy smiling at her. A small point of tooth was visible protruding over his lower lip. “All Hallow’s Eve is near an end,” he said softly.

The slow chimes of the clock echoed out across the city.

“Halloween?” Ransom was saying to Jack, a note of real alarm in his voice. “This must be- you’d better be getting home, whoever you are.” He counted the chimes out on his fingers. “You have an hour to find your way back. It should be plenty of time.”

“And if we don’t find our way out?” asked Fred, in a voice that sounded as though he knew the answer. Ransom pushed up his glasses again and twirled the dials on his watch.

“You’ll be trapped until next Halloween,” he said grimly. “I would stay, but I think the dullahan behind the bar just recognized me, and we’ll all be in much more trouble if he takes his proper shape.”

He vanished with a _pop._

“Does no one find that odd?” asked Susan, looking around the pub. The bartender put his head back on his shoulders and flipped up his collar, looking disappointed as he went back to fixing drinks.

“They’ve probably seen odder,” said Jack, thoughtfully. “You know, I have a feeling that wasn’t our Ransom at all. Ours always called me Jack.”

Susan glanced around again and pointed. “There’s the cat!” she said as she spotted the boy crouched near the door. He smiled at them, and his green, green eyes narrowed into bright slits as he bounded outside. Susan broke into a run, ducking under arms and between legs. Out of the corners of her eyes, the patrons of the pub seemed _wrong wrong wrong,_ too-sharp edges and too-wide smiles.

“Cat!” she called, and the boy looked back at her laughing and turned again into a cat. With a lash of his tail, he turned into an alleyway lit up by jack-o-lanterns. Susan followed him, her feet pounding on the cobblestones.

The cat bounded to the top of a backalley fence and settled there, tail curled around his paws. His eyes were the color of pumpkin leaves, the color of the light deep down in the forest where the shadows are green. “You _are_ funny,” he said. “Can’t you jump?”

The fence was higher than Susan’s stretched arms could reach, and she tilted her head back to glare at the cat.

“You led me into a dead _end,”_ she shouted.

“No ends are dead ones except the very last,” said the cat. “And you’re a Namer and a Caretaker besides, and nothing ever ends for the likes of you. Cats, we have nine lives, nine strokes of the clock ‘til time runs out- but once it’s gone it’s gone forever. Caretakers are human, to begin with, but you have something nothing but Namers have. You have _borrowed_ time.”

“Cat-” Susan started, fuming.

“Yes,” said the cat, simply.

He flipped backwards over the edge of the fence, and the jack-o-lanterns all blinked out at once. Susan stood in the dark, her heart beating very fast. Far away, something howled, high and strange. She drew a deep breath of the cold, smokey autumn air, trying to still the rushing in her ears.

“Hello again,” said a voice, very suddenly, and Susan screamed and turned with her fists up. The blonde man jumped out of reach, then gave her a disarming smile. “I’m here to help,” he said quickly.

His redheaded companion was lounging back against the wall, tugging at the ribbon Binding around his wrist.“Never follow a cat,” he said, sweet-voiced, and his teeth were red and dripping like arrowheads. “They’ll take you into the secret places of the world, but only the calico cats can be trusted to lead you out again.”

“I just recived a note addressed to me from- eleven years ago,” the blonde man told her matter-of-factly. He held up an envelope with a broken seal. “From, I think, a mutual friend. He’d like me to lead you out before the clock strikes twelve. The way out is longer than the way in, you see, and he was worried that Halloween Town might try and hold onto you.” In a quick movement, he pulled a silver watch from his jacket and checked the time, the red dragon embossed on the back just barely visible between his fingers. “Thirteen minutes? All the time in the world.”

“I’ve lost Jack and Fred,” said Susan suddenly, a new jolt of panic running through her.

“Waiting in the street,” the blonde man said, taking her shoulder and steering her out of the alleyway. The jack-o-lanterns lit up again as they stepped out, golden pumpkin smiles flickering in the darkness. Susan looked over her shoulder, searching the shadows for a pair of green, green eyes, but she saw nothing but jack-o-lantern flame.

“There you are,” Jack said at once. “I think some of the streets have changed places.”

“Yes,” said the red-haired man. “That’s why many people want the town mapped out. Cats and bats and skeletons, they’re all inconvenienced the same when Halloween Town decides it wants a different look. Only a Namer can make the streets stick.”

“We had better hurry, before you turn to mice,” the blonde man smiled, with a terrifying sort of cheerful calmness. “Or was it pumpkins?”

“You still haven’t told us your names,” said Fred, wrinkling his nose as the redhead stepped too close to him. “Seems t’me we shouldn’t be following you just yet.”

“Ten minutes,” the blonde man said, taking out his watch. The moon caught the dragon on the back and made it ripple like a live thing. “I think it was down Edelwood Street,” he said to himself, and set off at a brisk walk. Jack and Susan exchanged a glance, and then Jack took a deep breath and followed.

“I suppose we’re trusting them,” said Susan to Fred.

“So how is the Archipelago?” asked the blonde man as they came up to a sharp intersection of alleys. A bat was hanging from the glowing streetlamp overhead, and Susan ducked as it suddenly opened its wings and spiraled up into the night.

“Doing well enough,” said Jack, his gaze following the bat. “But tonight serves to prove that it will never run out of surprises.”

They turned sharply left, out past the store with the creaking herbalist’s sign and down the row of shops with orange candles in the windows. “If you’re surprised, it only means you need a better map,” said the blonde man. “That street’s imaginary, we’ll have to take a detour,” he added, making a turn.

The skeleton in the evening gown curtsied deeply to them as they walked past, and Susan pressed her lips together and pretended not to notice. The first chime of the clock echoed over the city just as they came to the gate. 

“Step out into the alleyway and walk to the main road quick as you can,” their guide said in a hurry, using his cane to push open the gate. “Don’t look back for anything. I can’t help you once the clock is done striking twelve,” he added, almost as an afterthought.

“Why not?” asked Fred.

“Why, because then it won’t be Thursday any more, will it?”

“ _Oh,”_ Jack said, “you’re-” but Susan pulled him over the threshold before he could say anything more.

“Come on,” she said, her eyes fixed on the light of the streetlamps ahead. It had begun to drizzle, and water splashed around her feet as she stumbled out onto the main road. Jack nearly collided with her as she stopped and looked up at the silver half-moon above them.

“Back in the Archipelago,” Fred said happily, shaking the rainwater off his fur. “How ‘bout we all go to my family’s sett an’ have some tea and toffee-pie?”

Susan turned around and finally looked behind her. Instead of an alleyway, there was a secondhand clothing store between the bookstore and the theater.

The ginger and white cat, looking much smaller than before, curled into a ball in the lighted window of the secondhand store. He gave Susan a long, green-eyed stare, and then nestled into the folds of an old jacket and fell asleep.

**Author's Note:**

> A list of most of the references I made in this fic, mostly for my own benefit:
> 
> That was, in fact, not CotIG's version of Ransom. (For context, in the Ransom Trilogy, the narrator enters into the main story a couple of times, and only briefly- but Ransom always calls him "Lewis.")
> 
> In case you didn't read through all the character tags, our two mysterious characters are loosely based on Gabriel Syme (blonde) and Lucien Gregory (redhead) from _The Man Who Was Thursday_. It's on Project Gutenberg and it's only like, a hundred pages. I swear I didn't write this entire thing just so I could plug this one specific novella.
> 
> The Werecat, who has no name, is loosely similar to the werecats from the Inheritance Cycle- although more similar to a real cat while in animal form.
> 
> A dullahan is an Irish mythological creature better known as the inspiration for the Headless Horseman. The one who works at this particular pub is named Abraham.
> 
> Ghouls in the graveyard was meant to be a weird sideways reference to "The Wild Swans."
> 
> The concept of a graveyard and an endless forest beyond a fence, the name "Edelwood Street," and a lot of the general autumnal vibe of this fic owe a lot to Over the Garden Wall.


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